Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Register Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

OWC Drives

S

Stephen Eufaula Kuns

Member
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
24
Reaction score
0
Points
1
Location
Southern California, USA
Lately production has been giving me OWC drives for offloading. They have Esata, USB 3 and FW800 ports. They have been working well and I take care to avoid any shocks and bumps. I always back up to my G Raid as well. Has anyone experienced issues using these OWC drives? I will always recommend G Tech. They have never let me down.
 
Stephen Eufaula Kuns said:
Lately production has been giving me OWC drives for offloading. They have Esata, USB 3 and FW800 ports. They have been working well and I take care to avoid any shocks and bumps. I always back up to my G Raid as well. Has anyone experienced issues using these OWC drives? I will always recommend G Tech. They have never let me down.
Click to expand...

We have used OWC on tons of projects with zero issues. I like their 4-bay raids.
 
I haven't had any issues with the OWC drives or drive cases, but I've had several issues with the cables they supply, often very cheap or even broken when I open the box, as a DIT/DAT I usually have a plethora of extra cables so its not a major issue for me, but it can be a nuisance for the client, later on.

I usually recommend G-drives and avoid G-raids for backup purposes, as I've had several G-raid controllers fail over the years, and I find that single volume G-drives tend be more reliable over a 3 to 5 year period. Obviously all hard drives will fail at some point, however.
 
Last edited:
I've been using OWC for all my on-set jobs lately since G-Tech discontinued the eSATA G-Drives and they've been really difficult to find (especially larger than 2TB). Have had zero issues, plus you get all 3 connection types at their current fastest speeds.
 
I've used OWC external mobile and desktop drives for probably 10+ years and they have always worked well. Probably 20-25 drives total.
 
I have 60+ active OWC 1, 2 and 3TB raids in use at my office. They are great. I've purchased 2x that amt over the past several years.
 
I am a long time user of OWC drives but I recently had a new four drive raid fail with vital data on it and it cost me $3000 to recover the data (we had 1080 backups but I wanted the Red footage back). So that made me think about the money I thought I had been saving by buying these drives. I used to swear by them but now, not so much. I replaced it with a Pegasus drive.
 
Don't bother with an OWC Mercury Elite or Elite Pro enclosure. Or the dual-drive versions in that series. They don't provide a straight pass-thru for the SATA channel due to the integration of USB3 and the speed on these enclosures is seriously crippled, even for USB/ SATA standards. I should take that statement back, these little enclosures work just fine for single typical 2.5" HDDs. However, you're wasting your time putting an SSD in them as it restricts them too much. And it can even be restrictive for read times on dual HDDs.

And that's all I've got at the moment.

Oh, their 6Gbps Jupiter rack mount storage is pretty nice and priced competitively. I don't know why they don't promote it on their site more. OTOH, I would recommend MAXX DIGITAL or Dulce' or Promise first for that sort of solution anyway.
 
Jeff, in regard to the dual drive versions, what do you mean by the SATA channel is not direct? I actually used two of those, 6TB striped versions just yesterday, and noticed it was kind of slow. One was 220MBps and the other was 180MBps, but I didn't have time to troubleshoot much. These enclosures have eSATA, FW800 and USB 2 only.
 
Big fan of OWC drives here. I think they're the next best thing to G-Tech.
 
Elliott Balsley said:
Jeff, in regard to the dual drive versions, what do you mean by the SATA channel is not direct? I actually used two of those, 6TB striped versions just yesterday, and noticed it was kind of slow. One was 220MBps and the other was 180MBps, but I didn't have time to troubleshoot much. These enclosures have eSATA, FW800 and USB 2 only.
Click to expand...
I get a steady 250MB/s in/out with my OWC enclosures over eSATA. The ones I have have eSATA II, FW800 and USB2 and seem to really only be limited by not having eSATA III. The models are Mercury Elite Pro and Mercury Elite Pro Quad. I've been thinking of getting USB 3 enclosures from OWC, but if they are limited to lower speeds than that I might have to look elsewhere.
 
I'm using the Firmtek U3 Miniswap since the OWC drives were slow over USB 3.0. Now I'm getting 440MB/s over USB 3.0! This is probably the fastest single drive enclosure out there. Tested faster than single thunderbolt enclosures. Been using it with sandisk Extreme II and Redmags offload in just a few minutes.
 
Elliott Balsley said:
Which eSATA card are you using? I think my card might be causing inconsistent speeds, it's a Highpoint 644L.
Click to expand...
I'm using them on a Hackintosh with an eSATA bracket connecting to internal Intel X79 chipset SATA II ports. My motherboard also has an ASMedia PCIe SATA controller with SATA III and connecting to that gives the same speeds as well (since the enclosures themselves only support SATA II).
 
Jett He said:
I'm using the Firmtek U3 Miniswap since the OWC drives were slow over USB 3.0. Now I'm getting 440MB/s over USB 3.0! This is probably the fastest single drive enclosure out there. Tested faster than single thunderbolt enclosures. Been using it with sandisk Extreme II and Redmags offload in just a few minutes.
Click to expand...
What SSDs are you using with that? Have you tried what speeds you get with 2.5" HDDs?
 
Mike Halper said:
I've been using OWC for all my on-set jobs lately since G-Tech discontinued the eSATA G-Drives and they've been really difficult to find (especially larger than 2TB). Have had zero issues, plus you get all 3 connection types at their current fastest speeds.
Click to expand...

I'm in the same boat as Mike. So far I've filled 13 of the 6TB multi-connection models:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/ME8Q7T60H128/

Had 1 RMA so far. Meh, they're ok but would be nice to be able to hit 300MB/s. 250MB/s average or less is like driving a Civic. Post likes the connection flexibility though.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top